CONSTERNATION IN THE NORTH.
The news of what she had done caused consternation throughout the North. President Lincoln called a special cabinet meeting, at which Secretary Stanton declared, in great excitement, that nothing could prevent the monster from steaming up the Potomac, destroying Washington, and laying the principal northern cities under contribution. The alarm of the bluff secretary was natural, but there was no real ground for it.
THE MONITOR.
The Swedish inventor, John Ericsson, had completed his Monitor, which at that hour was steaming southward from New York. Although an ironclad like the Merrimac, she was as different as can be conceived in construction. She resembled a raft, the upper portion of which was 172 feet long and the lower 124 feet. The sides of the former were made of oak, twenty-five inches thick, and covered with five-inch iron armor.
The turret was protected by eight-inch plates of wrought iron, increasing in thickness to the port-holes, near which it was eleven inches through. It was nine feet high, with a diameter of twenty-one feet. She drew only ten feet of water, and was armored with two eleven-inch Dahlgren guns, smooth bore, firing solid shot weighing 180 pounds.
The pilot-house was made of nine-inch plates of forged iron, rose four feet above the deck, and would hold three men by crowding. The Monitor was one-fifth the size of the Merrimac, and her appearance has been likened to that of a cheese-box on a raft. She was in command of Lieutenant John L. Worden, with Lieutenant S. Dana Green as executive officer. Her crew consisted of sixteen officers and forty-two men, and she left New York on the morning of March 6th, in tow of a tug-boat. The greatest difficulty was encountered in managing her, the men narrowly escaping being smothered by gas, and, had not the weather been unusually favorable, she would have foundered; but providentially she steamed into Hampton Roads, undiscovered by the enemy, and took her position behind the Minnesota, ready for the events of the morrow.
JOHN ERICSSON.
The famous constructor of the Monitor.
The Merrimac was promptly on time the next morning, and was accompanied by two gunboats; but while steaming toward the remaining Union vessels the Monitor darted out from behind the Minnesota and boldly advanced to meet her terrible antagonist. They silently approached each other until within a hundred yards, when the Monitor fired a shot, to which the Merrimac replied. The firing was rapid for a time and then became slower, with the intervening space varying from fifty yards to four times that distance. A number of the Merrimac's shots struck the Monitor's pilot-house and turret, the crash doing no harm except almost to deafen the men within. Most of the shells, however, missed or skipped over the low deck of the smaller boat.